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What is your take on the image that the mainstream media is portraing?

Is this philosophy topic? Well, let's make it one...

Originally, the idea was to have a free media/press that kept the government in check by informing the people of its nefariousness. This system collapsed a long time ago in a two-fold process. First, military-industrial complex companies began buying up major media outlets until we reached the point today where hardly any "official" news comes from any independent voices. Pretty much every TV/radio/paper is owned by a handfull of companies, all with the same plan: To Keep It That Way. We can appropriately describe the modern media machine as the public relations arm of the Federal government, simply telling the people only what they want to hear in order to condition them into the next stage of any given corporate agenda. They are singing the lullaby to the zombie masses in the crib.

This is where the second part of the process comes in. For a free media to work, the people have to give a fuck in the first place. After civilization received the conveniences of modern communications, people thought that they knew it all, and stopped looking for new info. Now, the "official" word is the only one. Everything else is, by the public's perception, irrelevant.

To answer your question, mainstream media is "programming" with a false reality. What they tell the proles is not what Power is up to. On the contrary, the current media's job is to restrict precisely that kind of information flow.

Take the Wikileaks thing going on. They are exposing through leaked documents the deeper lies into the corporate and governmental structures. They ought to be commended as a beacon of accountability. But how is the media handling this? They are conditioning people into the idea that this is criminal, and some outlets are even going so far as to call Wikileaks "terrorists". In a supposedly free country, this is a very dangerous precedent to be set. It means if anyone who is not of the carefully edited corporate media tries to break through some governmental lies, well, bad things will happen to them. This is what happens when society begins to shut down under the heel of dictatorship.

They portray the Lie. At least in the USSR, Soviets knew Pravda was full of shit. Such has never been the case in the western nations.
 
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they try to sell you stuff, be it the obvious one during ads or the cultural agenda they are pushing
 
I don't know, because I stopped reading/listening/watching any news about 6 months ago. I have no idea what has happened "in the world" in that time, but in "my real-life," everything is humming along quite smoothly.

Why let the media/government/outside-world dictate your perception of reality? They only feed negativity, so I replace it with positivity and get on with it.
 
Great answers guy's keep em' coming! And sorry for being vauge about the topic, but that just gives you more direction to take this question eh? (:
 
In theory the mainstream media should be a useful tool for transmitting information but what it does is transmit dysfunctional cultural values that we then soak up like sponges.

Even just watching a sitcom, which isn't meant to be taken seriously, it sends a lot of ridiculous messages about what it means to be a family, a partner, an adolescent, etc. It's like we're given an image of a reality that doesn't exist, but it can still have an impact on our perception of the world.

I get upset when I have to struggle with certain issues because of beliefs that I have about the world that are completely inaccurate but that are spread within our culture. It can be a difficult thing to live within a culture but not become it.
 
Ninja basically nailed it. The image the mainstream media is portraying is that more money and more stuff will make your life happier and you a better person.

I watch commercial TV, listen to commercial radio, and use websites that are for-profit and/or advertising supported. But I'm going to stop doing all three once I have kids. Mainstream media is best appreciated by people with the maturity and life experience to be able to separate the wheat (entertainment and information) from the chaff (consumption-oriented values). I thank my parents for keeping me away from commercial TV and radio as a kid.
 
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